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Lucian Freud Portraits – National Portrait Gallery

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A portrait by Lucian Freud matures and grows as much as it is painted. Not only did the reclusive artist spend many hours transferring each sitter’s personality and likeness to canvas, he built up the surfaces of his pictures until they took on a life of their own, erupting into nodules and pustules like fungi or real faces. This retrospective of 100 portrait paintings and works on paper brings together Freud’s friends, lovers and other associates, including family members and artists such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and David Hockney, while also exploring Freud’s stylistic development. The show includes ‘Portrait of the Hound’ (2011), the painting of Freud’s assistant David Dawson with his dog Eli, which was unfinished at the time of the artist’s death in July 2011